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Pixel Scroll 1/24/18 You Can Get Anything You Want At Filer’s Pixel Rant

(1) WORLDCON 76 MEMBERSHIPS SPONSORED FOR MEXICANX FANS, CREATORS. Artist John Picacio, a Worldcon 76 guest of honor, and John Scalzi, are funding four memberships —

GOOD NEWS: As Artist GoH of @worldcon2018, I'm pleased to share that this Monday, January 29th I'll be awarding a Worldcon attending membership to four #Mexicanx. Hugo Award-winning author / International Badass @scalzi and I are each sponsoring two. 1/6 pic.twitter.com/w8mIlEaTCI

Two #Mexicanx professional sf/f artists or writers AND two Mexicanx sf/f fans will each receive a membership. Who decides the recipients? ME. Mr. Scalzi says I should make the decisions, and so I will. 🙂 2/6

Want to be considered? Post a reply here or email me. Answer this: "Why do you want to attend this Worldcon?" I'll review your submissions and make my decisions. Don't craft an epic, but just make it you. Make it from the heart. 3/6

Fair warning: in some cases, it may be necessary to have a followup phone chat this weekend. Maybe, maybe not….we'll see how this goes. This business, this field, this life is about relationships. It's about your stories and your dreams. 4/6

I'm doing this because our world needs more #Mexicanx stories, more #Mexicanx sf/f pros and fans, and more #DREAMers. To own our future, we *must* own our narratives, lest we continue to be villainized, abused, and butchered. 5/6

(2) COMMEMORATION. Naomi Novik was asked by the New York Times to write an appreciation of Ursula K. LeGuin. She responded with a poem — “For Ursula” – which begins:

I want to tell you something true
Because that’s what she did.
I want to take you down a road she built, only I don’t want to follow it to the end.
I want to step off the edge and go into the underbrush
Clearing another way, because that’s also what she taught
Not how to repave her road but how to lay another
Even if it meant the grass came through the cracks of the pavement, and the thicket ate it up.

And now for my favourite Ursula Le Guin letter, one which highlights the two things I like best in an author, a lack of pretentiousness and a sense of humour. The following letter appeared in Philosophical Gas #2, published by John Bangsund in October 1970. The Hugo in question was awarded to Ursula for The Left Hand of Darkness at Heicon ’70, the worldcon held in Heidelberg, Germany in August of 1970. I assume the rocket was accepted on Ursula’s behalf by Terry Carr of Ace Books (which would explain a lot).

Last night, I went to the SFWA Reading to see my friends Josh Vogt, Greg Bear, and Tod McCoy read. I realized something: I’d missed my SFWA community. These are people I only see at conventions and SFWA events. I’d been so busy with my own stuff lately, and needed some distance from the organization after I stepped down as a Director-At-Large, that I’d pulled away too much. That was the wrong approach, but I suppose it was one I needed at the time.

It’s hard to express just how good it feels to be in a room full of like-minded people who all understand why losing one of the greats like Ursula K. Le Guin is such a tragedy or why naming Peter S. Beagle as SFWA’s newest Grand Master is such a joy. So many of the people I met up with last night are at various points in their writing careers. It was like looking at my past, present, and future writing self. They all understood the language of the writing professional and the publishing industry. It felt like coming home. It felt like family.

Recently, SFWA has had to deal with some tough issues. All of them center around protecting its membership at large. I know, intimately, what they’ve been going through—all the time spent, the discussions had, the decisions made—and I’m proud of the Board. I think, with the evidence they had on hand, they did the only thing they could do to protect the SFWA organization and the community they’ve built.

(6) MORE ON COMMUNITY. SFWA President Cat Rambo tweeted —

I logged on this morning to find out Sarah Craft made a point of making that first thread in there a celebration of Ursula K. LeGuin, and it's so sweet that I finally let myself cry about this terrible loss.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award has long been an excellent point of reference for taking stock of the changes in the field. It has a deliberately loose mandate to identify the “best” science fiction book of the year, acknowledging that the definition of “best” must be decided by a changing pool of jurors on an annual basis. The Clarke shortlist and the eventual winner showcase the work that has been done in the field, providing an intriguing snapshot of a field in flux. Since its inception the award has been at the heart of a robust critical discussion which interrogates the centre of the genre, its heartland, as well as the margins, where the genre pushes outward. This is why we’ve chosen the Clarke Award submissions list as a starting point for our discussions, and why we return to their shortlist in our discussions.

…What a shadow jury might do, then, is bring these debates into sharper focus. We believe the criticism is valuable, and that detailed, provocative, and respectful criticism enhances our understanding of the text and the cultures which produced it. This form of criticism is not intended to serve the needs of marketers or publicists but those of readers and writers. It aims not only to make visible but also to illuminate and contextualise.

Here’s the thing – a critic’s job is not to provide plot synopses, nor is it to tell you whether or not you’ll like a novel. It is definitely not a critic’s job to act as an unpaid publicity agent. A critic’s job is to look at the fiction itself, and to have a view about it. Critics write about all sorts of things. They think about where a text sits in relation to other works of sf, they explore themes, tease out aesthetic similarities and differences; they consider what a novel says about the world at large, and, yes, they make judgement based on their experience as informed readers. Which is, if you think about it, exactly the same kind of work as that carried out by an award jury.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that criticism per se has become so frowned upon in the last few years. Is it just that people don’t want to admit this is what is going on behind the scenes? Is it because the word ‘criticism’ carries two meanings, one analytical, the other disapproving? We couldn’t tell but we were fascinated by this pushback against the Shadow Clarke project and decided we needed to explore it further. So, we have decided to run the project for a second year, and this time, rather than simply focusing on the Clarke Award, we’re taking the opportunity to use the shortlisting process as a springboard to exploring the business of criticism more broadly, because we continue to believe that critical analysis has a vital role to play when it comes to talking about science fiction.

Geologists matching rocks from opposite sides of the globe have found that part of Australia was once attached to North America 1.7 billion years ago.

Researchers from Curtin University in Australia examined rocks from the Georgetown region of northern Queensland. The rocks — sandstone sedimentary rocks that formed in a shallow sea — had signatures that were unknown in Australia but strongly resembled rocks that can be seen in present-day Canada.

With great pleasure, Gallifrey One today is proud to announce the release of our Schedule of Events for our upcoming convention, The 29 Voyages of Gallifrey One in February. As in prior years, we are using the Sched online scheduling system for a seamless and easy-to-navigate program that can be used on your desktop or mobile device….

(12) RON ELLIK AND THE RONVENTION (1962). Although I never met LASFS member Ron Ellik, who died before I ever joined the club, he was a well-known newzine editor (Starspinkle) and influence on Bruce Pelz, who kept his friend’s name alive in the title of his annual wine and cheese party that I attended for years. Now Rob Hansen gives us new reasons to remember him —

Ron Ellik in 1962.

This year’s Eastercon is being held in Harrogate for the first time in more than half a century. Known as the RONVENTION, that earlier one was organised by Ron Bennett and attended by TAFF-winner Ron Ellik, hence the name. At the January first-Thursday pub meeting here in London, Eastercon committee and staff persons Mark Plummer and Caroline Mullan asked me if I could add a section on the RONVENTION to my website that they could link to. Since this was one of those I’d always intended to get around to I was happy to oblige. I drew mainly from conreports by James White and the two Rons when putting it together: “Ronvention, the 1962 Eastercon”.

I’m uploading this earlier than originally intended because of something I realised after I started work on it, namely that tomorrow, 25th January, is the fiftieth anniversary of Ron Ellik’s death at the tragically young age of 30. So I’m publishing it today in memory of him.

Weird to think that when Ron died, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were still alive, the Beatles were still together, and astronauts had yet to leave Earth orbit and strike out for the moon.

For weeks, Minnesota Public Radio refused MPR News’ repeated requests to comment on the company’s separation from Keillor. But as negotiations with Keillor’s company stalled and pressure from news organizations mounted, Jon McTaggart, president and CEO of MPR and American Public Media Group, broke his silence.

In an interview with MPR News Tuesday afternoon, he said the company’s separation of business interests from Keillor came after it received allegations of “dozens” of sexually inappropriate incidents involving Keillor and a woman who worked for him on A Prairie Home Companion. He said the allegations included requests for sexual contact and descriptions of unwanted sexual touching.

“When we reached a point that from all sources we had sufficient confidence in facts that really required us to act, we took the action we did,” he said. “It was the right thing to do. It was the necessary thing to do, and we stand by it.”

Since the firing, Prairie Home Companion has been renamed Live From Here.

The cavalier way men have systemically abused their power over women in and around the workplace warrants little leniency. But a more slippery question has emerged in this me-too moment of cultural reckoning: What to do with the works of artists whose conduct has been abhorrent?

In the growing gallery of alleged predators, there aren’t any artists I hold dear. James Toback’s films aren’t in my Netflix queue. I never mistook Kevin Spacey for one of the greats. And my admiration for James Levine’s conducting has been mostly of the dilettantish variety.

But inevitably a contemporary artist with whom I feel a special kinship will shatter my illusions about his or her character. I doubt that I will throw away the books or delete the recordings or swear off the films. I’m sure I’ll be disillusioned and quite possibly disgusted, but I know that an artist is not identical with his or her masterpieces and that few human beings can live up to their greatest achievements.

This is a theme that Marcel Proust returns to in his epic novel, “In Search of Lost Time” (more romantically known in English as “Remembrance of Things Past”). The narrator recalls a dinner party in which, as a young man, he meets his hero, the writer Bergotte. The young Marcel, intimidated to be seated among the important guests of the swanky Swanns, is struck immediately by the way Bergotte bears no physical resemblance to the man he had “slowly and painstakingly constructed … a drop at a time, like a stalactite, out of the limpid beauty of his books.”

More distressing to Marcel than Bergotte’s coarse appearance is “the busy and self-satisfied mentality … which had nothing in common with the type of mind that informed the books.” The narrator, a natural philosopher, begins to understand through this encounter that art is not contingent on the specific circumstances of an artist’s life.

Being well-read both inside and outside the genre, Wessells contends that the first major work of alternate history was a 1931 collection of essays, edited by J.C. Squire, titled “If It Had Happened Otherwise.” Its fanciful “lapses into imaginary history” include “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” by none other than Winston Churchill. Wessells also lingers over one of the most chilling dystopian novels of the 20th century, “Swastika Night,” written by Katharine Burdekin under the pen name Murray Constantine. Drafted in 1936 and published in 1937, it projects a Nazified far-future Europe where Hitler is worshiped as an Aryan god and women are kept in pens as breeding animals. (For more about this remarkable book, I recommend Daphne Patai’s excellent Feminist Press edition or the Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback, for which I wrote a short introduction.)

(17) A COMFORTING DOOM. Jill Lepore’s “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction” in the June 5-12 New Yorker last summer, is an essay-review of several dystopian novels, including Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Ben H. Winters’s Underground Airlines. Martin Morse Wooster flagged up its quotable last paragraph:

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling ot the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. ‘This isn’t a story about war,’ (Omar) El Akkad writes in American War. ‘It’s about ruin.’ A story about ruin can be beautiful. Wreckage is romantic. But a politics of ruin is doomed.

All things considered, the savvy choice for best picture might be Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which has been nominated in a whopping 13 different categories. Admittedly, it’s yet another film with a male director, but it does have a female co-writer, Vanessa Taylor, and a female lead, Sally Hawkins, and it passes the Bechdel Test within minutes. If that weren’t enough, it has major black and gay characters, as well as a South American immigrant; true, he’s a half-human, half-newt South American immigrant, but that’s not the point. More diverse and inclusive than any of the other best picture nominees, the film doesn’t just rail against sexism, racism and homophobia, it argues that they are all symptoms of the same patriarchal disease – a disease which all voiceless and oppressed people should defeat together. In short, The Shape of Water is a lot more militant than the average magic-realist fable about a woman who fancies a fish-monster. What’s more, it’s even more topical now than when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last August.

I wholeheartedly endorse what JJ said. On occasion I’ve tried to maintain a regular schedule of putting something out on a blog or similar. After a while I petered out. The energy & enthusiasm required to keep producing on a regular basis was beyond me. And that was for something simple, not the sort of wide-ranging Pixel Scroll Mike does.

So I’ll say it again: Thank you Mike for all your efforts. I really appreciate what you do. Please don’t feel like you’re letting anyone down if there isn’t a Pixel Scroll. File770 has become enough of a community that it runs just fine without. On the rare occasion there isn’t a Pixel Scroll, all it took was a post saying as much, and the comment thread rapidly fills up turning it into a roll-your-own Pixel Scroll.

Mike, to reiterate what others have said, I greatly appreciate your efforts to bring us the Pixel Scroll, and please don’t feel you owe any of us your hard work every day – the community here is certainly strong enough to adapt to a schedule that puts the needs of you and your family first.

On the Strange Eating Habits of SJW-credentials:
My family had a cat that ate corn on the cob. We thought it might be the butter but he would go for a bare cob as well. No loose corn, no creamed corn. We’d set a cob on a plate on the floor for him, he’d unsheathe his built-in cob holders, and go to town. After seeing that, no story of weird feline noshing surprises me. Amuses me, yes. Surprises me, no.

On the Herculean Effort to Pixelate a Daily Scroll:
As a con-runner i’ve had to maintain a Twitter feed for our small local con. As per the advice of more knowledgable people i met at a SmofCon, i tried to post something daily. Somewhere between Cleaning the Augean Stables and Slaying the Lernaean Hydra, i dropped back to posting on alternate days from sheer psychological exhaustion. That OGH can scroll up a multi-course feast of pixel-flavered morsels almost daily astounds me. Those rockets on his shelf are well deserved.

Mike, to reiterate what others have said, I greatly appreciate your efforts to bring us the Pixel Scroll, and please don’t feel you owe any of us your hard work every day – the community here is certainly strong enough to adapt to a schedule that puts the needs of you and your family first.

@Mike Glyer, I can only add my voice to that of everyone else. Thank you for File 770. Take care of your family and your loved ones, and take care of yourself. You have done and are doing so much for us here. We owe you, not the other way around.

Yes. Mike does a lot of incredible work here… abd ic need be we are able and willing to fend for ourselves for a while so he can see to the other aspects of life. Nobody who genuinely cared would ever say otherwise. (Except possibly in gentlest fun.)

@Cassy/@PJ: A good bar would ask how much vermouth, or which brand of gin — but assuming vodka (let alone asking which brand of something that’s supposed to be ~tasteless anyway) is a bit much. Some years ago I noticed a bartender putting a caramel swirl in a cone glass and was taken aback to hear about the sour-apple(?) “martini”. I don’t know when the trend started, but the blame has to lie somewhere between all those 30’s “sophisticate” movies (The Thin Man,…) and the Bond movies; somebody got the idea that everything, even goo no self-respecting bartender my age would serve, was better in a cone glass.

And adding to the praise for @OGH; I’ve never even been able to keep up a diary, let alone a daily blog. Belated acknowledgment (something about getting up and going straight in to a 5-hour choral rehearsal), but heartfelt.

Writers who write naked or wearing only a fedora do not write any better than a writer who is fully dressed.

…Has Clarion gone clothing optional?

.

Also, just sayin’. Anyone who has bats in their bedroom should catch them (with heavy gloves) and make sure they don’t have rabies. If you find a bat in your bedroom **assume you’ve been bitten and see a doctor immediately**.
>End PSA<

Also, just sayin’. Anyone who has bats in their bedroom should catch them (with heavy gloves) and make sure they don’t have rabies. If you find a bat in your bedroom **assume you’ve been bitten and see a doctor immediately**.

Yes, indeed. This is why I’ve had both the full rabies vaccine series and the booster shots–neither of the times I woke to find a bat in my bedroom were we able to catch it. Happily for me, I have no needle aversions.

Yes, a healthy bat has no interest in humans, aside from wanting to stay away from us. Rabies changes everything.

I approve of bats in principle, since the local species all eat mosquitos. I just don’t want them anywhere near me.

Ultragotha, that’s tragic–my heart goes out to those parents. In case anyone reading this needs to know, the horribleness of rabies shots is WAY overblown. It’s just another vaccine and getting a shot for it didn’t hurt more than any other vaccine I’ve gotten.

Ultragotha, that’s tragic–my heart goes out to those parents. In case anyone reading this needs to know, the horribleness of rabies shots is WAY overblown. It’s just another vaccine and getting a shot for it didn’t hurt more than any other vaccine I’ve gotten.

Sympathy for the parents is inappropriate in this case. They killed their child, because they weren’t willing to do the most fundamental part of their job as parents.

From what I read in previous decades, rabies post-exposure shots used to be very debilitating — not like a vaccination. It’s good to know this is no longer true, but I’m not sure slagging the parents is appropriate — depends on how much they were told.

In case anyone reading this needs to know, the horribleness of rabies shots is WAY overblown. It’s just another vaccine and getting a shot for it didn’t hurt more than any other vaccine I’ve gotten.

As Chip mentioned — the “horribleness” of post-exposure injections “in the olden days” was because they were using multiple globulin shots, rather than the vaccine as they do today.

I’ve been vaccinated for rabies myself (pre-exposure preventive because of my profession at that time). The vaccines tend to make your arm sore more than some other vaccines, but it’s no big deal.

And the reason to always assume that you’ve been bitten if there’s a bat in your house is not only because rabies changes the bat’s behavior, but also because their teeth are so small that it’s very easy to not know it if you *have* been bitten.

Father finds bat at work and puts it in a bucket.
Shows his 6 year old son, who loves animals. Tells him not to touch the bat.
Son touches bat anyway and gets “scratched”.
Father franticly googles. Google says to wash scratch with soap and hot water for five minutes, which he does.
Father tells son he needs to go to hospital to get shots.
Kid cries at thought of getting shots, so parents don’t make him go to hospital.
A week later evidently the bat is still in the house and rabies symptoms start to develop in the kid (numb extremities, headache, convulsions, hallucinations). Once symptoms start to show, it’s too late. You’re pretty much dead then, even if still walking around. (If you get rabies shots after exposure but before symptoms, that almost always prevents rabies.)
Parents take him to the hospital.
In very rare cases, the Milwaukee protocol will save a patient. So hospital puts kid into a coma to try that. It doesn’t work. The boy dies.
Deputies remove the family’s dog from the house because the bat might have bit the dog also.

In almost every instance the parents made bafflingly and tragically wrong choices and to an extent I agree with Lis, though I don’t see any anti-science in the articles I read. The decision not to get the vaccine seems based on giving in to the son’s tears. But I think their own guilt is enough and the public doesn’t need to add to that.

I do hope, though, that this story gets enough coverage that no other person makes any of these choices. Don’t bring bats or other wild animals home. Get all your pets vaccinated for rabies, even if they don’t go outside normally (one of our cats is a door-darter). If you or your child does encounter any animal, report it so it can be caught and if it can’t be caught, consult your doctor immediately and get the vaccine if recommended.